Every family has their own fractured family dictionary. Funny words or expressions that somehow catch on and get codified for time immemorial into the family vocabulary. It can often start with a mispronounced word from a lisping toddler. My then one-and-a half year old son couldn’t pronounce hamburger quite right and his version ended up sounding something like hambuppy. Forever more hamburgers in our house became hambuppies. My daughter was almost three before she got it through her adorable little head that it was Happy Birthday and not Happy Bird Day. Maybe she thought she came from a nest though we never offered up the stork story.
Or events occur. When I was a first- time Mom with an infant, I pulled a quasi- pornographic brochure from the mail box. I was righteously appalled and when my husband came home from work, I waved the offending material in front of his eyes.
“Do you believe this? Is this what we want our children exposed to? “
I hauled off to the spare room and ripped off a letter of complaint to the Postmaster, citing see attachment. A week later I got a reply.
Dear Mrs S.,
We try our best to scan for and remove questionable postal content but we can’t always catch it. On behalf of the United States Postal Service, I apologize for the salacious mail inadvertently delivered to you. We appreciate your understanding in this matter.
The point being, after that admittedly cringe- worthy Mama Bear memory, whenever something comes up that has no real recourse, something you might as well ask of the wind, my husband and I look at each other and say, well, we can always write the Postmaster. This one gets a lot of play, the world being what it is.
Porky Dumpy came to us by way of my mother-in-law. We were up visiting and on our last night she had made a nice dinner and midway through she pushed her chair back and said, “I feel so porky dumpy, and the awful thing is I’m still going to eat.”
“Huh?” I queried perplexed, “can you define porky dumpy? Seems to me it would mean you are full, sated, finito?”
“Well yes, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop eating.”
Porky dumpy went right into the book in ink.
As hungry as a one-eyes cat in a fish store? We co-opted that one from our good friend Gregg. He has a million crazy expressions but this one made the list.
And then there is get a plate? My husband’s best friends are two brothers and every Christmas Eve we are invited to their annual family buffet as honorary members of their clan. Good natured zingers fly around all night, but get a plate was ubiquitous. The question out of anyone’s mouth after hello was, hey man, did you get a plate? Or you two leaving? Well, y’all get a plate to take home. It fits in nicely in our lives because we don’t have an eat-in kitchen and no one had seen the top of our dining room table in years, so get a plate gets a workout.
A month ago we met the kids for dinner in downtown Philly to celebrate our daughter’s milestone Bird Day. Everyone was as hungry as a one- eyed cat in a fish store. My son ordered a hambuppy and I gave half of my dinner to my husband, who was in porky dumpy mode. We took a plate home.
After dinner we walked back to the car to find a big, fat parking ticket on the windshield. My former self would have been mad, as the no parking sign was half a block away from where we parked. Instead I just sighed and said, well the Postmaster is going to get an earful tomorrow.
Be well and be kind,
Susan
